A Year in London (Introduction)

A year in London.

No problem, I thought. ...Child's play.

After all, I'm a seasoned traveler. I spent my twenties collecting dramatic sights and sounds from around the world. I spent my 21st birthday in Accra, Ghana-- in a hot, stuffy office without a fan, trying to convince bureaucrats at the University of Legon to let me get a student discount on my airfare to Kenya, where I'd gotten a post to work with USAID. My 25th birthday I spent in Sarajevo, Bosnia-- looking down at pocketmarks in the pavement caused by grenades and explosions targeting civilians during the genocide there a few years earlier. And a few weeks after my 30th birthday, I was on a beach in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka-- the same beach that had been overwhelmed by the Boxing day tsunami.

Suffice it to say-- I'd seen a lot of the world by the Fall of 2007. Enough to think that London would somehow be easy.

It wasn't a conscious thought, mind you. It wasn't something I articulated to all my friends. It was just somehow there in the back of my mind. No new languages to learn. A big bustling town with lots of people from all over the world. No significant risk of diarrhea or amoebic dyssentery. Unlikely that the country would be thrown into a state of emergency (as happened when I was working in Sri Lanka and their foreign minister had been assassinated).

Easy.

That's what I was expecting when I got off the plane from San Francisco on a bright August Saturday, in a jetlagged daze, ready to begin my year of research towards my doctoral dissertation and next book. My luggage being too cumbersome to take a train, I opted for a ridiculously expensive blackcab into town.

The ridiculous price (65 pounds) of the cab should have been my first clue. But the driver was nice enough, and he chatted away at me as we wound our way through the busy streets.

He played Beatles tunes in the background (I got the feeling this was a real crowd-pleaser for his customers) and bantered on about the high cost of living in London, his divorce, his plans to relocate to the countryside, and a million other things I honestly can't remember because I was too exhausted to think properly. I nodded and threw in some polite comments here and there as I wondered to myself whether he was deliberately taking us the most crowded way so he could charge me more.

At long last we came to the apartment in Blackfriars where I was temporarily to stay. I dragged my suitcases in, threw off my airplane-sweat-stained clothes, took a long, hot shower and a much needed nap, and then prepared for the ritual of trying to stay awake until it was actually really nighttime.

I wandered off into the surrounding streets, unprepared for how surprised I would be at how much of a foreigner I actually felt in London, and how much I had in store to learn.

And thence my adventure began, and thence began one of the main motivating factors for this blog.

You can expect lots of stories and observations about England here-- or perhaps more precisely, how living in England has helped me shed light on my own background, the meaning of being American, etc.

But there'll be more here, too. I've named the blog "Many Ways Forward," because what has taken me to England is the same thing that took me to Bosnia and Ghana and Guatemala and India... a desire not just to understand the many different ways that people live on this planet, but also the many different ways people manage to make a difference. So you can expect reflections on inspiring changemakers and trends (both here and elsewhere), what it means to even think one *can* make a difference, and much more. (And perhaps some pretty photos and low-brow gossip as well.)

So, welcome. Thanks for coming. I'll be back soon.